Best configuration to use? Apple TV, iTunes

I'm currently looking for the best setup to use for my iTunes media which I want to stream via apple tv. I have a lot of TV Shows and Movies, which take up a ton of space, so I would like to move them to an external storage source to free up my laptop which is at about max capacity now. I'm not sure what my best option is here. I don't want to spend a ton of money so I'm not really looking for a NAS server or anything like that. I was thinking that I could just use some sort of external hard drive (2 TB I'm thinking) and wondered if anybody had any opinions or experience doing so. I would be connecting it to my macbook pro, and I assume will be using USB 2.0 since I believe 3.0 is not supported. I don't have a clue what type of drive I should use and what is the best option. I want reliability since this will be the only place I intend to store this media and I'd also like to make sure that I don't experience any issues with playback.

What I'd like to do is connect my macbook to the external drive whenever I get home. Is it bad to continually connect and disconnect a drive like this? then open iTunes and get the media off of there using my apple tv.

Basically I just wonder what kind of setup people are using to accomplish what I'm trying to do and what success/problems you've had as well as any suggestions you might have.

I have my Movies, TV Shows, Music Videos and Music spread across 7 different HDDs both internal and external (externals are all FW 400 though), this doesn't include my boot drive. You can very easily transfer your data to a large external drive and do what you want. One word of caution though, if you go to a single drive you raise the risk of catastrophic failure and a huge amount of data loss should the drive go south. Make sure you look at your back up or recovery options in advance.

I can't speak for the Macbook portion since I don't use mine in this manner but as long as you eject and connect the external drive properly each time you should be ok.

I am worried about losing everything, so I might look into something with some redundancy protection, but that starts to get a bit costly. Of course, compared to the cost of replacing my whole collection, it'd probably just be a drop in the bucket.

I am worried about losing everything, so I might look into something with some redundancy protection, but that starts to get a bit costly. Of course, compared to the cost of replacing my whole collection, it'd probably just be a drop in the bucket.

I like the Idea of the Raid Engine being built into the Controller, so no compatibility issues with any OS. Can be set up for Raid 0 or 1. However a little Pricey ($212.99 CDN from TigerDirect.ca) considering you still need to add the drives. It supports USB 2.0 Firewire 400, Firewire 800 and ESATA, Firewire 800 is what I'd be using to connect it to my MAC (Fastest read/write access) Raid 1 is disk mirroring, so If one drive goes bad you don't loose all your data, Raid 0 is much much faster (data Striping) but no redundancy.

Maybe Santa will be good to me this year...... meaning I may buy it for myself.